“Wilde and I got on extraordinarily well on this occasion.  I had not to talk myself, but to listen to a man telling me stories better than I could have told them.  We did not refer to Art, about which, excluding literature from the definition, he knew only what could be picked up by reading about it.  He was in a tweed suit and low hat like myself, and had been detected and had detected me in the act of clandestinely spending a happy day at Rosherville Gardens instead of pontificating in his frock coat and so forth.  And he had an audience on whom not one of his subtlest effects was lost.  And so for once our meeting was a success; and I understood why Morris, when he was dying slowly, enjoyed a visit from Wilde more than from anybody else, as I understand why you say in your book that you would rather have Wilde back than any friend you have ever talked to, even though he was incapable of friendship, though not of the most touching kindness[1] on occasion.

[Footnote 1:  Excellent analysis. [Ed.]]

“Our sixth meeting, the only other one I can remember, was the one at the Cafe Royal.  On that occasion he was not too preoccupied with his danger to be disgusted with me because I, who had praised his first plays handsomely, had turned traitor over ’The Importance of Being Earnest.’  Clever as it was, it was his first really heartless play.  In the others the chivalry of the eighteenth century Irishman and the romance of the disciple of Theophile Gautier (Oscar was really old-fashioned in the Irish way, except as a critic of morals) not only gave a certain kindness and gallantry to the serious passages and to the handling of the women, but provided that proximity of emotion without which laughter, however irresistible, is destructive and sinister.  In ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ this had vanished; and the play, though extremely funny, was essentially hateful.  I had no idea that Oscar was going to the dogs, and that this represented a real degeneracy produced by his debaucheries.  I thought he was still developing; and I hazarded the unhappy guess that ’The Importance of Being Earnest’ was in idea a young work written or projected long before under the influence of Gilbert and furbished up for Alexander as a potboiler.  At the Cafe Royal that day I calmly asked him whether I was not right.  He indignantly repudiated my guess, and said loftily (the only time he ever tried on me the attitude he took to John Gray and his more abject disciples) that he was disappointed in me.  I suppose I said, ‘Then what on earth has happened to you?’ but I recollect nothing more on that subject except that we did not quarrel over it.